As societal contracts fracture and the unemployment rate continues to hover near 8 percent, developing a unique personal brand and investing time in creating that powerful visual identity using graphic elements such as logos and symbols will be important. Whether creating a logo for your personal business card or for your entrepreneurial venture, you want to make sure that it has symbolic meaning and succinctly describes how you want to be perceived by your stakeholders. The colors you select and logo you create are important because they serve as the “face” of your brand… and you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Creating a powerful logo and associated marketing materials (web pages, stationary, brochures, book covers, etc.) are costly as the process will involve hiring professional graphic designers. It is easy for bigger brands to employ professionals, but harder for smaller businesses and individuals who want unique designs. Consider watching this great video by Reach Personal Branding called What Color is Your Brand? as you consider colors that best describe your brand attributes. You can then utilize those colors when partnering with graphic designers.

So where can you go to create awesome marketing materials for your business or personal brand? Fortunately, there are crowdsourcing websites like ZillionDesigns.com and that let you partner with a global network of graphic designers to create unique logo designs, web pages, stationary, marketing collateral, and so much more at very low cost. The process is simple. Once you create an account and post your project requirements on the portal, interested designers will post their creations.

When I was developing the Seaver Consulting logo, I received 188 designs in seven days. I opened a second project for stationary and received 161 designs. Most recently, I crowdsourced the front and back covers of the Incorporate You™ manual and received 52 designs. I had a wide variety of designers working on each project and was continually amazed at the creativity and great ideas they introduced. This process gave me the power to choose the designs that I liked and work collaboratively with the designers to create exactly what I wanted.

To help fund the publishing of the manual, I also created an account on the crowdsourcing website indiegogo.com.

The Incorporate You™ manual would not have been possible without the time, effort, and support of many wonderful people. In no particular order, thank you to Alison Riley, Kasen Bartels, Michael Lauer, Edgar Olivo, Carolyn Andrews, Nick Catsoules, Anisha Patel, Agata Polanska, Taylor Miller, Nicole Hartings, Amy Siemen, Kyla Bonnstetter, Brennan Allen, Mike Collette, Pavitraa Shah, Nicolette Alley, Sarah Selke, Jack and Robin Seaver, Linda Bartels, Scott Schneider, Kevin La Ra, and the team at Perfect Bound Marketing.

Crowdsourcing the Incorporate You™ manual was an incredibly fun process. I encourage you to think about using the above resources as you develop your personal and business brands. Go forth and be awesome!